 Hello, citizens of Earth and welcome to this week's edition of Tomorrow News. So glad to have you here with us. We've got a lot to go over so before we start, of course, just want to remind you that if you like what we do here tomorrow, don't forget to subscribe to us, like our videos, comment below and share us everywhere that you can. So let's not wait one more second. Let's go ahead and jump into it with your Tomorrow News for July 1st, 2021. Ryan, inform us, please. An internet connection is often a rarity on flights and if you do have the luxury of getting one, it's always ridiculously slow, but that could all change soon with the use of SpaceX's Starlink network. At the Connected Aviation Intelligence Summit, Jonathan Hoffler, SpaceX's VP of Starlink and Commercial Sales, told a panel that the company is already in talks with several airlines and they have an aviation product in the works, which is most likely an adapted antenna that will fit within commercial aircraft. This leads on from the approval SpaceX received from the FCC, allowing them to test Starlink antennas on large movable vehicles such as RVs, ships, trucks and crucially aircraft. They also filed some plans to test the service on five Gulfstream jets. Moving over to the ground, the Boca Chica in Texas, the fourth section of the integration tower has been spotted and constructed as it waited patiently in the yard for the test tank BN 2.1, which was going through a cryogenic proof test last Tuesday and once this was all completed, the integration tower section moved down the road to the launch site and was placed on top of the three other sections. A new water tower was added to the launch site in order to support future activity and SN20's aft dome has already been sleeved, showing great progress on the future of Starship vehicles. And remember, that fourth tower section I was on about will not only have SpaceX now rolled out a fifth, they've also rolled out a sixth section. These parts are being produced so fast it's hard to count. BN 3 is also getting ready in the high bay with an engine section being attached and some more rings being stacked. It's very exciting to see, especially as this is the booster we're expecting to take Starship onto an orbital trajectory before splashing down near Hawaii. And finally in the world of SpaceX for this week, Massey's gun shop and Range, which is a gun shop and unsurprisingly also a range just down the road from Starbase. It has been purchased by SpaceX and they're not going to use it to shoot people as insiders are proposing that it will be turned into a raptor facility. Possible uses of this may include repair, rebuilding and testing of the Methilox powered beasts. It's been a bit of time since we last had a spaceflight bonanza, so let's go ahead and get this one going and it's going to be so big that we are going to need a sea dragon for it. As the adage goes, no bucks, no buck Rogers. NASA is a federally funded agency. That means programs under its purview will live or die by the line item. Its budget season and the Biden executive branch has requested $24.8 billion for NASA's upcoming fiscal year, with the hopes of keeping the Artemis program on track for a 2024 landing. $24.8 billion is just under a 7% budget increase. Parsing through the details shows that Artemis gets $6.88 billion of funding. Breaking that down further, we find the space launch system receiving $4.48 billion, with the planned Gateway Lunar Station being handed $2.39 billion for continued development. Current operations in space such as the International Space Station and commercial crew program receive a combined sum of $4 billion. But the biggest chunk of NASA's budget is actually going to something that many people don't think of when you say NASA to them, and that is science operations. We often forget that NASA is a science agency as well as an exploration one, and a hefty $7.93 billion shows that the commitment to such is not forgotten. $3.2 billion will be going to planetary science, which covers current and future missions within and beyond our solar system, along with $2.25 billion for a new multi-mission earth science project focused on the effects of climate change. There's also a nice, cool $1.2 billion earmarked for SpaceX's human landing system contract to kick off development of the Option A award. The protest against that award by Blue Origin and Dynetics is still underway, so technically Option A is on hold. But in the downtime as we're awaiting clarification, the United States Senate has actually thrown out a little bit of a carrot, basically saying that, hey, if you add on an extra lander for the human landing system program, we'll give you some extra money. Called the U.S. Innovation and Competitiveness Act, the bill lifts up funding for other agencies such as DARPA and the National Science Foundation, but NASA gets a slice of this pie, specifically a $10 billion slice, with a directive to award a second lander contract within 60 days. Now, it is still in need of working in the United States House of Representatives before it is then returned to the Senate where it will then be officially official and sent to the desk of the Biden Executive Branch, but at this point, it does look quite promising. If NASA's handed this $10 billion, it is not a company-specific bailout, as some people have insinuated. No, it still has to go through a competition in order to get that second landing contract, and in addition to that SpaceX's contract and their system for the human landing system also gets money from that $10 billion additional. So it's not just sequestered away for one company to use. No, it still has to be competed for, and in addition to that, it will be spread out amongst the two that will be selected. That would be exceptionally helpful. A recent hearing attended by NASA Administrator Nelson revealed the final unknown cost of a bid for the human landing system's proposals. SpaceX's bid was publicly known at the revelation of that contract at somewhere around $2.9 billion, and in the protest filed by Blue Origin, they noted that their bid was $5.99 billion. In that final bid from Dynetics, we now know it was the highest at a whopping $8.5 to $9 billion. Yowza! It's not just crude lunar landers that NASA is currently working with. No, we still have Boeing's Starliner to do its test flight, and everything is starting to look pretty good. You'll recall back in December of 2019, Boeing launched their CST 100 Starliner on Orbital Flight Test 1 to the International Space Station, but fell short as a consequence of failures related to a multitude of problems, some of which should have been caught on the ground before the launch. But after a thorough dressing down by NASA, Boeing has proven that the next Starliner is ready to fly, and the 80 recommendations from NASA to address those problems have been completed to NASA's satisfaction. Orbital Flight Test 2, which is uncrewed, is currently planned for launch on July 30 via an Atlas V in the N22 configuration. N, meaning no payload fairing as the Starliner sits atop the Atlas V, the first two indicating two solid strap-on motors used for some extra kick at launch, and the final two denoting a classic Centaur upper stage with two RL-10 engines. If you're a rocket enthusiast like I am, that RL-10 definitely rings your bell, or it may even ring your nozzle extension. Eagle-eyed viewers of United Launch Alliance's broadcast of the launch of Spirits 5 noticed something rather strange. The nozzle on the Centaur upper stage's RL-10 engine was quivering a lot. Watching it live, I certainly felt a significant amount of clench come upon me, luckily the payload was delivered as planned. Shortly after an upcoming launch of the Space Force's STP-3 mission on an Atlas V was delayed to evaluate the issue, United Launch Alliance's CEO Tori Bruno, ever excellent in providing clear answers, later tweeted about the issue, saying it was a new carbon nozzle extension on an upgraded version of the RL-10, called the RL-10C ringing as it ran. As for what a ringing nozzle means, well that's for United Launch Alliance to tell us at some point further down the line, or maybe in three or four months someone can tweet at Tori Bruno asking him about it and he may answer it. Heck, remind me, I'll tweet at Tori and ask him about it. The RL-10C engine issue won't delay Starliner's orbital flight test too, because it uses a different version of the RL-10 without the nozzle extension, so full speed ahead for getting that capsule up into the International Space Station. And full speed ahead as well for several decisions in the world of space policy. Back at NASA again is former astronaut Pam Melroy. She flew three missions during the shuttle program, two of them as a pilot, STS-92 in the year 2000 and STS-112 in 2002, and she commanded space shuttle discovery on STS-120 in 2007. Her new mission? NASA Deputy Administrator, of which Melroy had widespread bipartisan support to be in that position. After her original retirement from NASA as an astronaut, Deputy Administrator Melroy worked in the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation and spent a stint at DARPA. And the Artemis Accords have gained several new members. On May 27th, South Korea signed on and then, less than a week later, New Zealand dotted the line on May 31st. And just a handful of weeks after that on June 16th, Brazil became the 12th country to sign on to participate in the Artemis Accords, which governs aspects of the upcoming exploration of Cislutur's space by NASA and the signatories. Earlier in the segment, I talked about NASA's budget being expanded a bit, and it seems that the funneling of money in the space isn't just happening exclusively with NASA recently. No, private space companies are also starting to gain a lot more capital and very, very quickly. Relativity Space was the biggest recent winner with a whopping $650 million raised in a single round. This also came with an announcement that they are working on an accelerating the development of a new rocket, the Terran R, a fully reusable launch vehicle. They're aiming for a 2024 launch, and it'll loft a payload above 20,000 kilograms to orbit. New engines to be used on Terran R have already been tested, and the rocket will be, as Relativity Space is known for, being entirely 3D printed. Now, consider that about eight months ago, Relativity brought in $500 million in a previous round of funding. So that means over the past half a year or so, Relativity has brought in $1.1 billion of new funding. That is just absolutely absurd amounts of money, but they are not the only company that has done so. Launcher fired off a Series A round of funding and acquired $11.7 million, which the company has noted should allow them to get their vehicle Launcher Light on its way to a path for orbit in 2024. Launcher themselves said they feel $50 million is enough to get to orbit. Launcher has also announced the development of a space tug that can ferry 150 kilograms of payload and be launched by their Launcher Light vehicle or a SpaceX Falcon 9. Please note that in all the recent announcements of new launch vehicles from Rocket Lab, Launcher and Relativity Space, that date of 2024 flying their vehicles by 2024 has been mentioned, and that is no mistake. The next National Security Space Launch Contracts, known as NSSL Phase 3, will be sent out probably sometime around 2025. So you'd really like to get your rocket flying a little bit before those contracts are doled out, because let's face it, nothing is quite as sweet and tasty for your company as government launch contracts. In addition, Leo Labs, a company that uses ground-based radars to perform tracking of objects in Earth orbit, has also raised some funding for itself to the tune of $65 million. This will be used to increase the locations and ability of its radar sites to enhance the space situational awareness services that Leo Labs provides. In our previous Tomorrow News episode, we covered NASA selecting two Discovery-class missions to Venus, and it seems now that the European Space Agency also would like to get in on the Venusian Fun. Called InVision, with a capital V, it's a medium-class mission with a planned launch in May of 2032, arrival at Venus in August of 2033, and then aerobraking until 2035, which at that point a four-year science mission will commence. Now, this was not done in coordination with NASA's own two missions to Venus, but both agencies have acknowledged collaboration will absolutely occur. InVision will use spectrometers, sounders, and radars to study the interior of Venus, the Venusian surface, and the atmosphere that it orbits above. But ESA aren't the only folks making moves on missions in our own solar system. Yep, that's right. NASA is looking at two future missions and doing everything they can to make them happen. The first is a NASA-funded small-sat mission to Mars called Escapade, which is another fantastic acronym standing for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers. The spacecraft are 60 by 70 by 90 centimeters and around roughly 90 kilograms in mass. The plan was to have them aboard the Psyche spacecraft, bound for astronaut Psyche, performing a Mars flyby in route being dropped off during that flyby. But they were bumped from the Psyche mission, being considered no longer viable in NASA's eyes. However, NASA did allow the Escapade mission to hunt for a ride before being outright canceled, and it looks like luck was on their side. Rocket Lab jumped into the arena, and the two Escapade spacecraft currently named Blue and Gold will be built from Rocket Lab's Photon satellite bus design. The Kiri engine on the Photon will be used to enter the two small-sats into orbit around Mars. The program the Escapade mission is a part of cost caps everything at 55 million dollars. Now if that includes the launch services for a Rocket Lab electron, that may mean that Escapade is one of the cheapest interplanetary science missions that has ever been flown. And if that really does turn out to be true and we continue to see these amazing and well-coordinated small-sat missions, we could be in for an incredible era of exploration of our solar system just about to begin within the next decade. The second mission is called Near Earth Object Surveyor and is a proposed half a meter sized infrared space telescope that will hunt for potentially hazardous Near Earth objects. NASA has specifically set up Neo Surveyor to be a directed mission, meaning that it doesn't compete for its funding but is funded because it has been developed to meet a mandate, specifically one set in 2005 by the United States Congress for NASA to discover 90% of Near Earth objects at least 140 meters in size. It's about time we start having these serious missions for planetary defense. It's been long overdue and look for Neo Surveyor to be launching sometime for operations to begin around 2026. Let's go ahead and move on to talk about the present, specifically two things that have occurred that are very good, one thing that is bad and things being in and out of order in our own solar system. NASA's Insight Lander on Mars is still going nearly three years after landing, but a sizable amount of dust has accumulated on the surface of its solar panels. Systems such as wipers or cleaners add mass and complication so there's no system to clean them off. But as we always say on tomorrow, never bet against JPL. The wizards who work there had Insight's robotic arms scoop up some Martian regolith and then at the windiest time of day drop some onto the panels. Now you think that wouldn't work but that falling regolith was blown sideways across the panel and the larger grains impacted smaller grains dislodging and carrying them away and no joke they gained 30 watts of power by doing this. Absolutely astounding to prove that sometimes you really do have to get dirty to be clean. On June 7th for the first time in 21 years, a spacecraft performed a close flyby of Ganymede, one of Jupiter's four Galilean moons. It passed at a measly 1038 kilometers in altitude at 19 kilometers per second. Juno used the opportunity for a close pass to shorten its orbit around Jupiter from 53 days to 43 days as it continues into its extended mission. In this great animation of the flyby made by Jason Perry, we can see the science data being gathered via the Juno CAM instrument in the red, green, and blue color channels. In addition, the orientation of Juno with its high gain antenna pointed towards Earth allowed gravity science measurements to be made. Several other instruments on Juno that were active don't have their fields of view shown in this animation, but they took infrared data and Juno's stellar reference unit, an imager used to determine Juno's attitude, was used to take images of the side of Ganymede opposite of the Sun. Project scientists on the Juno mission will compare the images taken to those by the Galileo spacecraft during its mission at the Jovian system from 1995 to 2003 and see if there are any changes, potentially adding a clue to the current unknown rate of impacts in the outer solar system. And wrapping up this bonanza is a bit of a concerning story, unfortunately, to all of those who love space telescopes. Hubble is currently in safe mode due to a computer issue, or at least it might be a computer issue. A malfunction of the computer did occur on June 13th and that stopped all operations, but on June 17th an attempt to switch to backups failed. More tests will be needed to determine what to do next. Hubble has been on orbit operating for 31 years and the last servicing mission from a space shuttle was 12 years ago in 2009. Is it possible to even think of considering some kind of servicing mission using a modern system, be it robotic or crude, to head up and give Hubble a nice dusting? Possibly. But for now we just have to wait and see what the best efforts of scientists and engineers on the ground can accomplish. And that wraps up a massive space flight bonanza for me. I think I'm going to go relax, maybe have a beer or six and pass out for a very long time. Ryan, back to you. Last week I told you all about the new spaceports being constructed on mainland Great Britain, and while it seems like some people took notice, as not only has it caught the attention of Virgin Orbit and Lockheed Martin, it's now caught the attention of Sierra Space, a subsidiary of the Sierra Nevada Corporation. Dream Chaser is now only a dream away it might seem for spaceport Cornwall, as in a statement Sierra Space said that the location, currently known as Cornwall New Key Airport, is a suitable and viable return location for the orbital return of a Dream Chaser vehicle. Of course, with everything spaceflight, more studies are needed in order to figure out whether landing the lifting body space plane in the UK is actually a viable solution, as currently all the missions contracted for NASA's commercial resupply services programme involves landing the vehicle back at the former shuttle landing facility and the Kennedy Space Centre. So much talk about landings and none about launches, so let's have a look at two recent ones starting off from next door to that exact place the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. 0426UTC on June 6th played host to the eighth launch of an SXM satellite atop the B1061 booster from Space Launch Complex 40. Headed for a sub-synchronous geostationary transfer orbit, that's a mouthful, all 5,400kg of payload seems to be in good shape. 8 minutes after liftoff, just read the instructions, successfully received this booster 642km downrange. This Long March 2D rocket lifted off at 0303 UTC on June 11th, carrying the Beijing 3 and 3 other satellites. Headed for a sun-synchronous orbit, not only is this the 52nd flight of the Long March 2D, this is also the 52nd orbital launch attempt of 2021. Lot of numbers surrounding this flight, a lot of 3s and 252s. Moving forward a couple days to June 13th, we have the launch of a rare bird, its Pegasus XL. Carrying the TACRL-2 mission to a 98° sun-synchronous orbit, all we have as evidence of the 45th launch of this type of rocket are these photographs of the vehicle housed under the body of the Lockheed LT11 tri-star jet used to transport it into the skies. Another two days and another launch from Northrop Grumman, switching air launch for the land launch and the banana rocket is back. The first Minotaur 1 launch for over 2,760 days took place at 1335 UTC on June 15th at LP-0B at the Waltz Flight Facility in Virginia, carrying well something for the National Consulate's office whatever was on board, as made it to low Earth orbit. Yet again, another two days and another launch, but not from Northrop Grumman, it's another launch from China, but it wasn't just any launch as it had a very special purpose to carry three people, being Commander Ni Heixiang, as well as Taikonauts Tang Hongbo and Liu Bo-ming to the Tiankou Cabin Module, the first module of the nation's brand new Tiangong Space Station. Lifting off at 0122 UTC on June 17th from SLS-1 at the Zhiquan Satellite Launch Centre in China, the trip to the low Earth orbit outpost was a speedrun, if I've ever seen one, arriving at 0754 UTC on the exact same day. That's just a smidge over 6 hours and 30 minutes, which means that in terms of transit time, Soyuz has some competition. The 7th crewed Chinese spaceflight is expected to last around 3 months, returning to Earth in September. Another launch from SpaceX on the exact same day, June 17th, but this time being at 1609 UTC from SLIC-40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The mission's name being credited to Neil Armstrong, all 3880kg of payload has successfully made it to a 20,180km circular medium Earth orbit. Once again, the booster used for this mission, B1062, successfully returned to Earth for more service, touching down smoothly with an uninterrupted camera feed on just read the instructions. There's also a new kid on the block in terms of ferrying recovery as this launch marked the first launch of use for host Briarwood, replacing the previous temporary phone, covering both Chile and Bordeaux. And finally this week, another launch from China to round things off. LC3 SLS-2 at the Zhichang Satellite Launcher Center played host to this long March-2C, which also launched on June 17th. The 9th YG-30 mission to the best of our knowledge has gone well and is currently in its 610km Earth orbit. On board for this launch was also the Tianqui-14 payload, which we know nothing about. Something we do know about are some upcoming launches, so let's take a look. Before we leave for another week of spaceflight gossip, let's all thank the citizens of tomorrow. Their continued support greatly helps the show and spreads the message of the exciting future that is ahead of us. If you want to join them and experience the perks for yourself, head on over to youtube.com forward slash tmro forward slash joint to become a citizen for as little as a dollar a month. Feel free to share the show too, that would be greatly appreciated. But for now, stay safe and goodbye.